Full Frame Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival today announced its lineup for the festival to be held April 3-6 in Durham. Along with the full list of feature and short documentaries are a Full Frame Tribute to veteran documentarian Steve James and the titles in the Thematic Program, which this year is called “Approaches to Character” and is under the curation of Lucy Walker. In a response to the honor of a retrospective, James said, “I’m excited to have so many of my films play again in front of the appreciative audiences at Full Frame. It will give me a rare opportunity to reflect on where my career has led me, and maybe make connections between the films that have eluded me before. And I’m determined to resist the impulse to go re-edit them all again.”

The James retrospective includes screenings of At the Death House Door (2008), Hoop Dreams (1994), The Interrupters (2011), A Place Called Pluto (2013), Reel Paradise (2005), and Stevie (2002), as well as a panel discussion on “Hoop Dreams at 20” that will feature footage not included in the film. Various subjects of James’s films–Arthur Agee, Jr. from Hoop Dreams, Ameena Matthews from The Interrupters, and the Reverend Carroll Pickett from At the Death House Door–will also attend, as well as many of James’s collaborators from Kartemquin Films in Chicago.

Lucy Walker, whose films include Waste Land and The Crash Reel, has assembled a group of what could essentially be called character study films, though they investigate their subjects’ characters with a variety of techniques and perspectives. “In each of the brilliant titles I’ve selected, the filmmaker has found a different access point to their subjects. Through these diverse techniques we learn something profound about human beings and how they construct their identities,” she said, “often revealing the individual in more powerful and fascinating ways than meeting a person in real life.” Titles also range in age and length, making this an excitingly diverse selection of new and classic films.

The titles in the Thematic Program are:

THE ARBOR
Director Clio Barnard

CREATURE COMFORTS
Director Nick Park

DAVID HOCKNEY IN THE NOW (IN SIX MINUTES)
Director Lucy Walker

DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND
Director Lucy Walker

THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS
Director Lars von Trier, Jørgen Leth

HOTEL TERMINUS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF KLAUS BARBIE
Director Marcel Ophüls